“What are your personal experiences that have convinced you that climate change is real?”
Hi, my name is Graham Tratt. I'm 80 years old. I come from Sydney, Australia. I've traveled around the world quite a bit and I guess the most obvious sign of climate change I've seen is that the glaciers are retreating everywhere in South America and North America. I think everywhere there are glaciers, they're retreating. In New Zealand, they're retreating. We don't have any glaciers in Australia, so they can't retreat. Other things are changes in water temperatures in the sea. It's getting warmer, which is causing massive bleaching of our barrier reef. I think last year when they did a study, 80% of the reef had been bleached, which left 20%. If that continues, the barrier reef will disappear. Also, at the moment, I'm in Indonesian waters and there are significant signs of dead coral everywhere. There's still lots of live coral, but in places there's large extensive bleached coral. Other signs of climate change are because the oceans are warming, which means that fish that would be in one region have now moved to another region, which is at a temperature that is more suitable for them. This has happened in Tasmania where kelp forests have been destroyed by species that normally don't travel that far south because it's too cold, but now it's got warmer. Climate changed, due to carbon dioxide emission, there's been evidence. When I was at uni in the 60s. You only had to read scientific American to see how the CO2 levels were increasing and they've increased very much more since then. And back then, not many people knew about that, but it was obvious that with CO2 increasing the earth's temperature was going to increase and it has. Last year, I think, was the hottest year on record and the year before that was the second hottest year on record. We now have the situation with bushfires in the US in February. California had massive bushfires. That's their winter. Normally Australia would get charter, firefighting, water bombing aircraft from United States to use in our summer. But now that's becoming less tenable because they are needed virtually all year round in the US. In Australia, we still don't get bushfires in wintertime, but the bushfire season has grown, so it's a longer part of the summer.
